Andrey Avinoff revisited

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(My apologies for the recent downtime. The hosting for this site has been a bit more unstable than usual.)

At a time when various Russians are trying to rewrite their nation’s gay history, there’s hardly been a better moment to remind ourselves of some of the people who contributed to that history. When I discovered the art of Andrey Avinoff (1884–1949) in 2007 most of the online examples of his work were in the collection of the Kinsey Institute. Avinoff was a friend of Kinsey’s (the artist escaped the revolution to live in the USA), and the professor no doubt took an interest in the evident homoeroticism of the drawings.

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The homoerotics (mostly male nudes in fantasy scenes) are combined with some remarkable occult designs in Avinoff’s 21 illustrations for The Fall of Atlantis, a book-length poem by George Golokhvastoff published in 1944. The book was a limited edition, and a complete set of the drawings wasn’t forthcoming in 2007 so it’s been great to find Javier at Bajo el Signo de Libra posting the complete set. These are stunning illustrations which really ought to be seen by a wider audience; Avinoff isn’t a name you find very often in either the gay or the occult art world yet his draughtsmanship and imagination demand attention from both.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The gay artists archive

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

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